by Amy Milne | Feb 16, 2019 | QSOS, Quilt Jigsaw Puzzles
Your Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle Tip: for best results, solve puzzle on this page on a desktop computer or laptop. If you are solving on a mobile device, click on the puzzle piece icon in the lower righthand corner to solve on the Jigsaw Planet website. Welcome to another quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! This month, we’ve got a new challenge for you! See below for clues. Be sure to sign up for our blog notifications, so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming puzzles. Name That QSOS Interviewee! This week’s puzzle spotlights a quiltmaker who was interviewed for the Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories oral history project on August 5, 2011. This interview is one of the first 20 interviews added to the new QSOS website to launch our QSOS 20th anniversary year. The Quilt Alliance is in the process of a major update for the project that will include searchable audio recordings and transcript, interview summaries and keywords and photos. The entire collection is still viewable on the QA website here, but this new site, when completed (hopefully by early 2020), will make the collection of more than 1,200 QSOS interviews with quiltmakers far more accessible online. Visit the new QSOS site with sample interviews here and consider making a $25 donation to sponsor an interview! Clues: Excerpts from the Interview Excerpt 1 Interviewer: Tell me about the quilt you’ve brought today to talk about. Interviewee: The quilt that I’d like to talk about is the one hanging over here behind us called “Everything but the Kitchen Sink.” I started it about 15 years ago. I was an occasional quilter, and then I became a mother. There was at a point where I was making a lot of quilts and children’s clothes for my daughter Beatrice. I wanted to make her quilts when she was a baby. But I would never make the perfect quilt for her. I ended up making her about 20 quilts. None of the quilts were ever good enough for my daughter, so I cut them all up and accumulated many orphan blocks along the way from doing so. I was looking at quilts but not really knowing much about making a quilt. The only quilts I had in my house were the crazy quilts my grandmother made. And so that’s how this quilt started, I was trying to mimic what my grandmother did. Mimicking what her process was. Because it was the only thing I knew, from watching her quilt as a child. Excerpt 2 Interviewer: What do you think that this quilt says about you? If someone came upon this quilt, what do you think it says about you as a quilter? Interviewee:…Everything I had went into it, along with my everyday life. Maybe it says, I’m open to the life throws at me? I’m a painter by trade previously so I was trying to figure out the color balance and make it all work. It’s been a complete learning experience so it kind of sums up a wide portion of my life including getting married, having a family, moving to New York, it accumulates everything. Excerpt 3 Interviewer: So your interest in quilting was originally sparked by your grandmother? Interviewee: Yes, definitely, and by the basic needs of growing up on a farm. My father had an upholstery business in Minnesota and I grew up on a farm in MN. My motherwas a seamstress for Fingerhut for a while. I don’t know if anyone knows Fingerhut out here. But that’s why my grandma had all theses quilts made out of polyester double-knit. My grandmother was a crazy-quilter. In MN you had about five of these quilts on your bed, because it’s cold and we did not have heat in our house. We heated our house with wood stoves. So we would have about five of these quilts on our bed and they stayed there all night long. The weight of them is unforgettable and comforting. Think you know who the mystery QSOS Interviewee is? Now solve the puzzle to see if you’re right! About Quilt Alliance We rely on the generous support of donors and members like you to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by becoming a member or renewing your membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt…
by Amy Milne | Jan 19, 2019 | Jigsaw puzzles, QSOS
Your Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle Tip: for best results, solve puzzle on this page on a desktop computer or laptop. If you are solving on a mobile device, click on the puzzle piece icon in the lower righthand corner to solve on the Jigsaw Planet website. Welcome to another quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! This month, we’ve got a new challenge for you! See below for clues. Be sure to sign up for our blog notifications, so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming puzzles. Name That QSOS Interviewee! This week’s puzzle spotlights a quiltmaker who was interviewed for the Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories oral history project on March 7, 2008. This interview is one of the first 20 interviews added to the new QSOS website to launch our QSOS 20th anniversary year. The Quilt Alliance is in the process of a major update for the project that will include searchable audio recordings and transcript, interview summaries and keywords and photos. The entire collection is still viewable on the QA website here, but this new site, when completed (hopefully by early 2020), will make the collection of more than 1,200 QSOS interviews with quiltmakers far more accessible online. Visit the new QSOS site with sample interviews here and consider making a $25 donation to sponsor an interview! Clues: Excerpts from the Interview Excerpt 1 Interviewee: Like any exhibit, one of the most interesting parts I think of doing a quilt show is to stand next to other people and hear their comments, especially if they don’t realize that you made the quilt, whether it is yours or someone else’s, because you really learn the inside of what quilters are thinking. I have often thought that there should be a tape recorder in the back of quilts and then play it later. Excerpt 2 Interviewer:Tell me about your interest in quiltmaking. Interviewee: Oh, Karen it goes back to the Stone Ages now. My quilting started in New Orleans of all places, although as a little girl I have always done patchwork. I was gifted with a lot of energy and I think to keep me out of my mother’s hair she would give me needle and thread and so I’ve always done stitching. I did the doll clothes thing. I guess I was always with a needle and thread going through cloth. It just always intrigued me, and I really didn’t have any question about what I would do when I went to college. Excerpt 3 Interviewer: How do you want to be remembered? Interviewee: Oh my, I told my group in Wilkesboro, someone asked me that or I guess it came up in the course of my conversation, and I said I guess I will always beremembered for the full proof knot, it was one of the things I taught on one of the very first shows, my full proof knot for quilting and dog ears. I don’t think anyone has come up with, when you cut off the extension of a triangle, those little things fall off and I have always called them dog ears, but that is kind of in jest, but I think what I would love to be remembered for is probably the comment that people say when they saw me doing patchwork on TV is like, well I can do that, if she can do that, I can do that. I guess that is what I would like to be remembered, that I’m really basically an ordinary quilter that was able to transcribe the fun, the excitement of doing it through a television screen and then many people can say, well I can do that. I guess that is what Iwould like to be remembered for. You are getting me all very emotional about this Karen. [laughs.] I guess the bottom line is that for many of us quilting is an emotional thing. I guess that is the bottom line. Think you know who the mystery QSOS Interviewee is? Now solve the puzzle to see if you’re right! About Quilt Alliance We rely on the generous support of donors and members like you to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by becoming a member or renewing your membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt…
by Amy Milne | Jan 19, 2019 | QSOS
The Quilt Alliance’s keystone project, Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories, or QSOS, celebrates an important birthday this year: two decades of preserving the voices of today’s quiltmakers. This unique oral history collection, the largest of its kind in the world, includes over 1,200 interviews with quiltmakers. Each quiltmaker interviewed between 1999 and 2017 is represented in the collection with an audio recording, a written transcript and photographs of the quilt, often pictured with the maker. The first interviews were conducted at the International Quilt Festival in 1999 with backing from Quilt Alliance founders Karey Bresenhan, Nancy O’Bryant Puentes (both of Quilts, Inc), and Shelly Zegart (of the Kentucky Quilt Project), as well as key Quilt Alliance board members. From 1999 until January 2007, the Quilt Alliance partnered with the University of Delaware, Center for Material Culture Studies, under the guidance of Dr. Bernard Herman, to house QSOS records. From January 2007, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has served as the physical archive for QSOS interview materials. Researchers, in addition to accessing interview transcripts and photographs online via the Quilt Alliance website, can access audio recordings of interviews and related materials directly from the Library of Congress. Since its inception, QSOS has been a grassroots project with volunteer leadership. Volunteers, lead for many years by artist and Quilt Alliance board alumni Karen Musgrave, conducted interviews and curated exhibitions drawn from the archive. In addition, scholars have utilized the archive of interviews in their research. The interviews show us the complexity and diversity of quiltmakers and their quilts. Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers, the anonymous quiltmaker has gained a voice. As we enter the 20th year of the project we are adding a new level of accessibility to this collection of voices. The migration, already underway, will move all interviews and their audio recordings to a new website, qsos.quiltalliance.org. Twenty QSOS interviews have been added to the new site so far, allowing users to listen to the recordings for the first time online. New features allow users to search and browse the interview transcript, create links to specific playback points in the recording, and view an index for each interview. Indexing is done by project volunteers or staff members and entails the creation of a partial transcript, a synopsis and keywords for each section of the interview, all of which make the collection easier to search and browse. The Quilt Alliance is now raising funds to support this transition and to date, 241 interviews have been sponsored by generous supporters. To sponsor an interview, visit the new QSOS website and make a contribution of $25 or more. Your donation will help us cover the cost of preparing an interview to be made available on our new QSOS platform. That includes the costs associated with cassette digitization, file formatting, transcript editing and indexing, web hosting, and other fees. View a list of QSOS Sponsors to date…
by Amy Milne | Dec 15, 2018 | QSOS, Quilt Jigsaw Puzzles
Your Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle Tip: for best results, solve puzzle on this page on a desktop computer or laptop. If you are solving on a mobile device, click on the puzzle piece icon in the lower righthand corner to solve on the Jigsaw Planet website. Welcome to another quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! This month, we’ve got a new challenge for you! See below for clues. Be sure to sign up for our blog notifications, so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming puzzles. Name That QSOS Interviewee! This week’s puzzle spotlights a quiltmaker who was interviewed for our Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories oral history project on November 11, 2011. That interview is one of the first 20 interviews added to the new QSOS website to launch our QSOS 20th anniversary year. The Quilt Alliance is in the process of a major update for the project that will include searchable audio recordings and transcript, interview summaries and keywords and photos. The entire collection is still viewable on the QA website here, but this new site, when completed (hopefully by early 2020), will make the collection of more than 1,200 QSOS interviews with quiltmakers far more accessible online. Visit the new QSOS site with sample interviews here and consider making a $25 donation to sponsor an interview! Clues: Excerpts from the Interview Excerpt 1 Interviewer: Can you tell me about your process in creating this particular piece that you brought today? Interviewee: Yes I can. I work from photographs. I took the photograph and enlarged the image using a large format photocopier. On the photocopy, I traced out the majordesign elements with a black sharpie marker. The Sharpie marker bleeds thru the 2:00paper so when completed, the mirror image of the image is created on the back side of the photocopy. This becomes the master template pattern used to create the design. Each template piece was numbered then transferred to paper backed fusible web and then individually cut out. Fabrics were auditioned for each template unit, fused then cut out. Using a applique pressing sheet, the template pieces were reassembled into larger units (petals of the flower). I would work one unit (petal) at a time around the circumference of the flower I worked on entire, then I completed the center. The bee is a needle felted, and the wings are made with Angelina fiber and organza that I stitched , then attached. Excerpt 2 Interviewer: Do you currently belong to any quilt guilds or groups or both? Interviewee: I do. I belong to a number of groups. I am member of International Quilt Association (IQA), Studio Art Quilting Association (SAQA), IQF),Austin [Texas.] Fiber Artists (AFA) and it’s like an art quilt group. I’m also a member ofSurface Design Association (S.D.A.), and the Austin Area Quilt Guild. Excerpt 3 Interviewer: I’m going to ask you some questions about just your general feelings about quilting in general, like what do you think makes a great quilt? Interviewee [seven second pause.] I’d have to think about that for a second. What I think that makes a good quilt really is the fact that it’s been made. We live in such a society where people don’t know how to do anything. They go somewhere else to have things done. I think it’s important to be able to make something and to go through that process so all quilts to me have value and meaning because somebody made them and they weren’t mass produced. I guess I’m not one for kits and that type of thing or preprocessed type stuff. Every quilt has a story, there’s a meaning that every single quilt artist has and they’re trying to convey. So, just the fact that they’re made from a beginning quilt that, the first attempt that somebody trying to do something to most intricate and elaborate style quilts, just the fact that they were even thought of and made in the first place I think means something to me. Think you know who the mystery QSOS Interviewee is? Now solve the puzzle to see if you’re right! About Quilt Alliance We rely on the generous support of donors and members like you to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by becoming a member or renewing your membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt…
by Amy Milne | Nov 17, 2018 | Jigsaw puzzles, QSOS, QSOS Spotlight
Your Quilt Jigsaw Puzzle Tip: for best results, solve puzzle on this page on a desktop computer or laptop. If you are solving on a mobile device, click on the puzzle piece icon in the lower righthand corner to solve on the Jigsaw Planet website. Welcome to another quilt jigsaw puzzle from Quilt Alliance! This month, we’ve got a new challenge for you! See below for clues. Be sure to sign up for our blog notifications, so that you don’t miss any of the upcoming puzzles. Name That QSOS Interviewee! This week’s puzzle spotlights a quiltmaker who was interviewed for our Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories oral history project on November 5, 2011. Clues: Excerpts from the Interview Excerpt 1: “I consider myself a traditional quiltmaker, although I’m going into new venues, which is very, very exciting but typically I’ve been known as the Star Lady, and handquilter. So this particular quilt was made entirely by me, I didn’t even have a celebrity stunt sewer do the binding [laughs.] and it has machine pieced stars, hand appliquéd and handquilted.” Excerpt 2: “What is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? Couple years ago we would’ve said bringing in new quilt, younger quiltmakers, but I’m thrilled about the modern quilt guild, they’re doing their own thing. At Quilt Market you saw all these young women and I see them facing the struggles that I faced as a young mom, being a quiltmaker. I would say right now in history, right now it would be the socioeconomic issues and quilt shops having to close down. I think our industry, despite what’s all going on in the world, is relatively alive and healthy and if all of us commit to bring in one quiltmaker, just one quiltmaker, then that quiltmaker is going to pass her fairy dust onto somebody else just like my Katie Coons.” Excerpt 3: “How will I be remembered as a quilter? The good news is, is I’m on the internet now with [removed to make it harder on you!] because it’s really who I am. I was, I had a persona that was dictated by Home and Garden Television, that I needed to be, and that’s really not who I am. I’m a little bit, have a little bit of a wild side, if anybody knows me. I think how I hope, I hope how I am remembered is somebody that opened the door of quiltmaking to another person and by the magic of me having to fall into that television opportunity, I was blessed that particular incident. It will not be for my quiltmaking skills [laughs.] Think you know who the mystery QSOS Interviewee is? Now solve the puzzle to see if you’re right! About Quilt Alliance We rely on the generous support of donors and members like you to sustain our projects. If you support our mission of documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers, join us by becoming a member or renewing your membership, making a donation, or learning how your business or corporation can become a supporter of the Quilt…
by Amy Milne | May 30, 2017 | Events, QSOS, Quilter's Take Manhattan
Sherri Lynn Wood is the keynote speaker at this year’s Quilters Take Manhattan, the Quilt Alliance’s annual fundraising event in New York City. Also speaking at the Saturday, September 16 Main Event at the Fashion Institute of Technology will be Merikay Waldvogel and Michael A. Cummings. Women of Color Quilters Network founder Carolyn L. Mazloomi will interview Cummings for Quilters’ S.O.S.- Save Our Stories (QSOS), and Craft Napa founder Pokey Bolton will emcee. Sherri is a working artist based in Oakland, CA. Most recently she completed a four-month residency at Recology San Francisco with the task of presenting a body of work made completely from materials scavenged from the city dump. She has been making quilts and facilitating improvisational patchwork as a restorative life practice for twenty-five years. She is the author of The Improv Handbook For Modern Quilters – A Guide to Creating, Quilting and Living Courageously (Abrams 2015). We recently asked Sherri to answer five questions we ask quiltmakers as part of our QSOS oral history project. 1. What is your first quilt memory? Sherri Lynn Wood (SLW): One of my father’s co-workers in Richmond, VA, named PT for Hiram Petty Thomas, had a farm in South Hill, Virginia, which he visited every weekend to work it. Sometimes our whole family would visit PT on the farm just for a day. One summer when I was 9 or 10, I rode up one weekend with PT and stayed for a whole week with just his Aunt Helen and his mother Florence. PT returned the following weekend and brought me back with him. Helen and Florence ran a florist business in South Hill and maintained the farm some. During that week they took me to their neighbors house, one farm over, to a quilting bee. The hostess lowered a big frame from the ceiling and Florence, Helen and two or three other women sat around and quilted for the afternoon. I remember peeking underneath and waxing thread, and then threading the needles. When we were back at PT’s farm, Helen always had a sewing machine set up on the dining room table with stacks of diamonds, or squares, or triangles ready to be stitched whenever there was a free moment. They showed me how to chain stitch the patches, and that, I think, was the first time I ever sewed on a machine. I bought my first sewing machine when I was twelve, but didn’t make my first quilt until I was 24. 2. Have you ever used quilts to get through a difficult time? SLW: Yes, actually. I became depressed, and I dropped out of divinity school at Emory University around the age of 24 and I took up quilting. I loved it so much that I got a booth at the local farmer’s market and began making quilts for sale. I had always thought I would be a minister, and when I dropped out of school because of the depression, I was without a sense of identity. Quilting was hands on and very soothing, and eventually led me into becoming an artist. Over the course of my career and as I’ve become more healed myself, I’ve consciously chosen a trajectory of service and healing with my art and quilting practice. Also, fun note – seven years after dropping out of divinity school, Emory accepted one of my first major bodies of art work, “Parable Quilts,” for my masters thesis and awarded me a Master of Theological Studies. 3. What are your favorite quilting tools? SLW: Well, I have so many favorites, but let’s start with scissors since they seem to have taken a back seat to the rotary cutter. I still use my rotary cutter but there is so much I couldn’t do without my scissors. Since I do not use rulers to square blocks up, as my quilts get bigger I have to use my scissors to cut large sections and rows to match before I flip and sew. I always list SHARP dressmaking shears on my list of supplies for students, and am always dumfounded by how many people ignore this staple tool and bring dull or an itty bitty pair of scissors to class. Scissors are also necessary for cutting clothes apart, which I do a lot in my make-do and passage quilting practice. I also love my 15 year old straight stitchin’ and shootin’ Juki. It’s still going strong! Can’t live without my Q-Snap floor frame, also at least 15 years old, for hand quilting. 4. What do you think makes a great quilt? SLW: This is a great question and my answer is the rhythm of the maker’s attention. Another way to say that is honesty, or limbic resonance, or making relationships from a soul level. I’m all about flexible patterns and following internal cues to improvise patchwork. The more honest I am with myself, the more present I am to my emotions, habits, desires, joys, and challenges as they arise, the better the quilt. There is a lot of emphasis in the quilting world and the broader culture on good design, but my emphasis is on self-discovery, seeing my patterns. My goal is to get my design-planning brain and ego out of the way so that the patterns can flow as immediately as possible from a soul level. It’s not so easy to do! For me it’s a life practice. When I see this kind of soul-level honesty, this kind of deep rhythm of attention in another person’s quilt, I’m in awe. 5. What do you think is the biggest challenge confronting quiltmakers today? SLW: I may have answered that on a personal level in the question above. However, on a community level, I think quilt makers are diverse politically and it’s a rare opportunity these days to work side by side and share a similar love for a craft or activity, with people who have opposing political views. I think the biggest challenge may be for us to continue to explore, understand, accept and celebrate our differences rather than ignoring them, as well as celebrating our similarities. I would love to see the community of quilters to continue to grow in diversity in the areas of race, age, gender, nationality, and class. I think it’s great how guilds come together to make quilts for other people who have suffered or are at some disadvantage, but what I would like to see more of is these same quilters going out and quilting WITH these communities, like refugee communities, or with homeless populations for example, rather than for them. There is so much potential and infrastructure that has barely been tapped for social change, systemic healing, and growth for guild members and the broader communities they are a part of….
